1 A.M. Jailbreak Review – Tunnel to victory!

Continuing the Japanese Game Festival (日本のゲーム祭り) here on Punchboard, it’s the turn of 1 A.M. Jailbreak from the team at Saashi & Saashi. Have you ever wanted to emulate an exciting, Shawshank-esque bid for freedom from incarceration? Is recreating The Great Escape on your table your dream game? Well, while 1 A.M. Jailbreak may not be the Steve-McQueen-on-a-motorbike you’re hoping for, it’s still a fantastic, clean, card-shedding game you might want to take a look at.

The ‘story’, for want of a better word, of 1 A.M. Jailbreak is that you and your fellow convicts are planning an escape. A tunnel’s been dug, but you need to manage the number of people going through it to make sure as many as possible escape. Take too long and dawn will be here before you know it, ending the escape plan abruptly.

The reason the word story is in quote marks above is because of just how thinly that veneer is applied to the game. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a lover of dry Euros, so a loosely fitted theme is something I’m used to, but 1 A.M. Jailbreak takes it to a whole new level. The only thing in the entire game that fits with the idea of a jailbreak is the (admittedly gorgeous) prisoner artwork on the cards. That’s it, though. Mechanically, nothing happening is jailbreaky. But you know what? That’s okay. I never really felt like I was making a circus troupe in Oink’s version of Scout, either.

The game’s premise is simple. You have a hand of cards, and you want to get rid of all of them. On your turn, you can play a set of the same numbered cards, or a run of ascending cards; 2, 3, 4, 5, for example. The game’s twist comes in how many cards you play. You’ve always got to play a number of cards in the range of +/- 1 compared to the last played cards. So if there are three ‘in the tunnel’, i.e. most recently played, you have to play two, three, or four cards. If you manage to do that, you have to draw a single card from the market – sorry, ‘cell’ – or deck. If you can’t play, you have to draw two.

The really tasty bit comes from the ability to shoot ahead, using the game’s parlance. If you can play a card that adds to the previously played set, you can do so, thereby losing another card from your hand, but simultaneously increasing the number of cards you need to play to complete your turn. It’s a really nice little tweak to what would have been an otherwise by-the-numbers shedding game, and it turns it into one I really want to play more.

Final thoughts

1 A.M. Jailbreak is Saashi & Saashi distilled. More of the beautiful artwork from Takako Takarai daubed atop a simple, engaging game. I can’t ignore the fact that the theme is non-existent, but I need to temper that statement by saying that it honestly doesn’t matter. It’s no more important than it was in Scout, Splendor, or even Happy Families.

So while 1 A.M. Jailbreak may not capture the same feeling of making an escape as a game like Vital Lacerda’s Escape Plan or even Mind MGMT, it doesn’t matter. It’s a small game in the form of a deck of cards that’ll take you twenty minutes to play, and you’ll enjoy every one of them.

I’m sitting here now, thinking of things I want to say to close out the review, and it dawned on me. Even though the jailbreaking is absent in the theme, the gorgeous artwork and presentation are what drew my eyes to it on Saashi & Saashi’s stand at UKGE, so maybe it’s doing exactly the job it’s meant to be doing. I digress. If you like clean, balanced card games like Scout, give 1 A.M. Jailbreak a try. I think you’ll really enjoy it.

How to buy it

Unfortunately, 1 A.M. Jailbreak doesn’t seem to have wide distribution yet. If you’re in the UK, I highly recommend checking out Travel Games, a specialist importer of foreign games. Otherwise, your best bet is to grab a copy at a bigger convention, head to Essen Spiel in the Autumn, or order directly from their webshop. If you’ve got a Japanese drop shipping service, maybe give that a go too.

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